Fox
News’ latest superstar, Glenn Beck, might be a fool—but he’s
a fool with a following and a $50 million contract

By Hal Crowther

Last
year my brother left me a phone message, recommending a rare
visit to the world of television to check out a new face on
CNN. Not just another radio right-winger masticating headlines,
he said, but a creature from some even lower rung on the ladder
of life, working an act so addled and inept that he had to
be kidding, had to be auditioning for Comedy Central—but who
was, in fact, dead serious. (Our era, in the words of the
blog Eschaton, “begins the age when it is impossible to tell
parody/irony/performance art from completely sincere product.”)

A few weeks later, steering the remote in the direction of
the Weather Channel, I stumbled across Glenn Beck. My brother
did not exaggerate. I was amazed, but mixed with my astonishment
was something that felt like pity. How many days before the
gnomes in charge would reverse the bizarre decision that had
brought this poor fellow to the surface here, to CNN and national
scrutiny, and pull the lever that would send him plummeting
back to the cable-access netherworld from which he had inexplicably
escaped?

It’s a struggle to find useful comparisons. Late at night
on one Manhattan cable channel, there’s a Bible show called
Open Forum With Harold Camping. Harold wears an undertaker’s
suit and a big yellow tie. He’s about 90 years old and seems
to have had a stroke or two; his eyes are glassy, his voice
and movements are robotic and his warnings of imminent Armageddon
are generically absurd. Next to Glenn Beck, Harold is the
most improbable personality who ever scored his own TV show.
Harold’s excuses are extreme age and physical decrepitude,
if not actual senility. Beck’s excuse, like his path to celebrity,
is a mystery.

On TV, a medium partial to pretty faces, he looks like the
misbegotten love child Rush Limbaugh and Joan Rivers gave
up for adoption: a soft, fuzzy-headed, pop-eyed Big Bird with
a wet, petulant little mouth that emits a braying, wheedling
voice better suited to a phone solicitor than an entertainer.
In a medium where even the right affects expensive suits,
Beck tends to dress as if he’s still doing radio. He giggles
like a prurient schoolboy when he’s pleased with himself,
which is way too often.

He weeps. I believe men should weep, and I’ve been known to,
but not in public, not on camera, not on cue. In any manual
for children trying to figure out the world of adults, a public
weeper would be singled out as a key grown-up to avoid, along
with men who can’t keep their hands to themselves and those
who consume right-wing radio. What else? Beck is pudgy (just
speculating recklessly from a few cases, but is fascism fattening?),
graceless, rude, hysterically ill-informed and to all appearances
an idiot. Michael Savage, a Radio Right fearmonger who seems
to be crazy rather than stupid, calls Beck “the hemorrhoid
with eyes.”

Even for “conservative” media, where the bar is set so low
and ratings are stimulated by feeding raw meat to the Cro-Magnon
fringe and driving liberals mad with indignation, some of
the things Beck has said are exceptional. He greeted the first
Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress with “Sir, prove to me
that you are not working with our enemies.” His comment on
last year’s California wildfires was “I think there’s a handful
of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot
of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.” He
recently begged his congregation to refrain from killing sprees,
if possible, because one more Timothy McVeigh might destroy
conservative momentum. A Beck tirade against volunteerism,
to him a Hollywood/communist plot, concluded “It’s almost
like we’re living in Mao’s China right now.” (“It’s loony-tunes
TV,” marveled columnist Mike Littwin.)

Though Fox News audiences never hold their heroes to the highest
logical standards, a few loyalists blinked last summer when
Beck railed about Barack Obama’s “deep-seated hatred for white
people,” which presumably included the president’s mother
and family of origin. But my personal Beck favorite, an all-time
Media Moron Highlight selection, was this wild swing at Al
Gore in the spring of 2007:

“Al
Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating
them. It is the same tactic, however. . . . You got to have
an enemy to fight. Then you can unite the entire world behind
you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy:
the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming.”

Glenn
Beck, ex-Top 40 disc jockey, recovering drug addict and alcoholic,
convert to Mormonism and the National Rifle Association, is
American popular culture at its most incomprehensibly weird
and offensive. He’s also a huge success, a hit, a phenomenon—a
star. By America’s traditional standards of accomplishment
(rarely including the artistic or aesthetic), Beck, 45, is
one of the hottest properties in show business. A year ago
his talk-radio ratings earned him a five-year, $50 million
contract with Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of the
Clear Channel conglomerate that also broadcasts Limbaugh.
Last January, his TV show took the jump from CNN to the higher
cotton at Fox News, where he abuses liberals, logic and President
Obama as part of the Troglodyte Trio that includes Bill O’Reilly
and Sean Hannity, the big bad wolves of brain-dead broadcasting.

Last month he leapfrogged over them all by making the cover
of Time magazine. Time isn’t what it used to
be, but decades ago when I worked there, the cover story was
a kind of sacred ritual, with venerable editors agonizing
over the worthiness of cover subjects (they didn’t have to
be admirable, but they had to be momentous). The story by
David von Drehle, a notably talented writer, was, of course,
not positive about Beck or his influence, but it gave him
some credit (“funny”? “a gifted storyteller”?) that made me
wonder which rundown media neighborhoods my old friend von
Drehle has recently been obliged to patrol. I can’t shake
the picture of this clown Beck—he calls himself “a rodeo clown”—decorating
his huge office with Time covers: Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Glenn Beck.

It’s as if Clarabelle from The Howdy Doody Show had
been resurrected, with his horn reprogrammed to issue reactionary
boilerplate instead of plaintive honks—and a multitude had
gathered to listen. In the eight months since I first called
attention to Beck’s strange ascent, he’s risen from “Who?”
to “God, not him again” in what may well be record time, even
for the fast-forward freak show of American media. The neoconservative
Weekly Standard hails him as “the man of the moment.”
He’s become a legitimate cause for alarm in magazines he couldn’t
begin to read, including The New Yorker and The
New York Review of Books, which credited him with “taking
the scalp” of Van Jones, a high-ranking Obama appointee who
had unwisely signed a petition linking the Bush administration
to the 9/11 attacks. When Jones was forced to resign, the
White House retaliated with an ill-advised counterattack on
Fox News, which only enhanced his prestige with the Obama-baiting
Republican fringe.

In Beck’s profession—whatever that might be construed to be—there
are at the moment no more mountains to climb. The cash, celebrity
and personal vindication these triumphs represent would be
galling enough for those of us familiar with his work. But
the bitterest pill may be his “literary” career. The publishing
industry is almost as frail and diseased as the newspaper
business, and as certain a victim, in the long run, of America’s
rapidly declining literacy. Serious readers stopped complaining
years ago that the best-seller lists were dominated by depressing
trash. Still, this is ridiculous.

The year 2008, a bad year for most reactionaries and Republicans,
was a banner year for Glenn Beck, best-selling author. He
began that year at No. 1 on The New York Times nonfiction
list with An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s
Biggest Problems. (Assassinate Al Gore?) At year’s end
he rose to No. 1 on the Times fiction list with The
Christmas Sweater, a personal holiday epiphany, as Beck
describes it, turned into a novel of sorts with the help of
two ghostwriters. Other authors may have topped both lists,
but I’m sure no one else has ever done it inside a single
calendar year.

His next literary offering, the oxymoronic Glenn Beck’s
Common Sense, rode his current notoriety to the top of
the nonfiction list and sold a million copies in four months.
His latest, Arguing With Idiots, is now scaling similar
heights. For writers and readers, especially for hundreds
of us who’ve sent out books of our own with medium-high hopes
and watched them stall out in the low five or even four figures,
it hurts some to see those ads announcing “over half a million
copies in print” for the hardcover adventures of Glenn Beck.
He loves to rub it in, gloating with particular glee that
he outsold Just After Sunset, the most recent novel
by Stephen King, a liberal who called Beck “Satan’s mentally
challenged younger brother.” Instead of posting positive reviews,
if indeed he has some, Beck’s book ads showcase harsh words
from his liberal critics:

“Glenn
Beck shouldn’t be on the air.”—Al Franken

“Finally!
A guy who says what people who aren’t thinking, are thinking.”—Jon
Stewart

His tiny light is never hidden under a bushel. He promoted
The Christmas Sweater with a 47-city tour of personal
appearances, cruising our highways in a tour bus with the
book’s dust jacket freshly painted on both sides. There was
also a Sweater stage show with a 10-piece orchestra
and a “Broadway” gospel singer, closed-circuit simulcasts
in selected movie theaters, TV tie-ins and hybrid media links
too cutting-edge for me to understand.

Philip Roth is no match for this author; neither is King nor
John Grisham. This is publishing’s grim future, when every
book is attached to a celebrity, and every launch is a three-ring
circus. Beck has just signed a contract with Simon & Schuster
to produce books for juveniles and young adults. Soon the
Pied Pinhead will be coming for your children.

In
these hard times we’re facing, people will complain about
outrageous salaries for less deserving citizens. Plaxico Burress,
the New York Giants wide receiver who went out drinking with
a loaded Glock pistol in his pants, consequently wounding
himself in the thigh, nearly vaporizing his privates and pulling
a serious prison sentence, owns a $35 million contract unrelated
to his IQ. Outfielder Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers,
who earns more than $20 million a year, never matured much
beyond the seventh grade. But Burress can catch the ball,
and Manny can hit the ball, in each case as well as anyone
who plays his game. Glenn Beck, who with his literary revenues
outearns both of them, is a different proposition. He can’t
hit, he can’t field, he can’t run, he can’t talk, he certainly
can’t think. He doesn’t even look good in his uniform.

His incontinent rhetoric may strike you as fantastic, even
psychotic, but in the alternate universe of talk media nearly
everyone practices what a psychiatrist might call “belligerent
projection”: Liars call their enemies liars, fascists call
their enemies fascists, idiots call their enemies idiots.
Whatever it is that Beck does effectively, you’d do well to
study it, those of you who are out of work or underemployed.
On its surface, broadcasting is a simple game, an advertising
medium ruled by ratings and numbers. Ears and eyeballs, as
they actually say. At the time he was awarded his $50 million
radio contract, Beck was averaging 250,000 listeners per quarter
hour. That doesn’t sound like so many (Limbaugh averages 3.4
million), out of 300 million Americans. With such a pot of
gold at stake, it seems that you, or nearly anyone, could
come up with some gimmick, some bait that might lure the golden
tenth of one percent to listen to you, too. Why couldn’t you
compete with Glenn Beck?

The sky’s the limit for the one who can decipher and duplicate
his appeal. In the lucrative but overcrowded format that includes
right-wing talk shows and pure proto-fascist ranting, stars
are revered for their infuriating arrogance, for obnoxious
overconfidence that makes reasonable people groan and grind
their teeth. All progressive Americans share the dream of
strangling Bill O’Reilly with coaxial cable, or driving their
SUVs back and forth across Rush Limbaugh’s distended abdomen.
What these stage villains do is mostly theater, mostly shtick.
They sneer, they bluster, they brag; perhaps they’re not sincere.

But there’s an art to it, an element of Mephistophelian performance.
Not everyone can play Iago, not everyone can do Snidely Whiplash
with élan. Look at the pantheon of the far right, and there’s
usually some hook we can grasp. Ann Coulter is essentially
a kinky lounge act—Cruella De Vil menacing Democrats instead
of dalmatians—but she’s also an anorexic blonde with a smart
mouth and a daring hemline who sends out certain signals to
the reactionary libido. To us, Sean Hannity may sound like
a Holy Cross linebacker whose helmet absorbed too many burly
forearms, or the cop’s slow son who washed out of the police
academy (actually his education didn’t go that far). But to
many middle-class Catholics, he looks like a handsome, clean-cut
Irish altar boy who chose this instead of the priesthood so
he could take better care of his mother.

That leaves Glenn Beck, who after only seven years on the
national scene is well on his way to surpassing them all.
He draws a slightly younger audience than Limbaugh or the
Fox News fixtures: O’Reilly’s average viewer, according to
the Nieman Foundation, is 71 years old. On occasion Beck’s
audience tops 3 million and exceeds O’Reilly’s army of surly
septuagenarians. O’Reilly, unamused by this trend, recently
raised an eyebrow at one of Beck’s antic outbursts and suggested
that his colleague was insane. Beck even owns a slight edge
among women, who generally avoid the purple patriot formats.
Yet there’s no one, male or female, I’d dare accuse of finding
Beck sexy. In spite of the dreadful things he says, he isn’t
articulate enough to raise liberal blood pressure in the O’Reilly-Coulter
tradition. Numb discomfort is what he provokes, much like
what you’d feel watching a large snake swallow a rat.

In lieu of the meek, the mediocre will almost certainly inherit
the Earth, as democracy intended. But this is not about mediocrity.
Mediocrity is so far above the place where Beck dwells, he
couldn’t see it by standing on his money. To make any sense
of him, we need to go back to the roots of right-wing broadcasting,
which are, in spite of all its authoritarian, capitalist,
neo-monarchist rhetoric, essentially populist. This industry
cultivates the worshipful attention of the flagrantly below
average, some so far below that they believe the Republicans
are the party of the common man. Its core audience is made
up of people who never sat in enough classrooms or read enough
books to be able to separate reasonable convictions from irrational
fears and prejudices. Conceptually insecure, they need constant
reassurance that people with access to microphones and TV
cameras—important players, to them—can be just as irrational
as they are. If you can comfort and legitimize this audience,
they reciprocate by buying your books without reserve, though
it’s a question whether they actually read the books, or need
to. It helps if these player/authors, in spite of their outrageous
compensation packages, seem common as dirt. And they don’t
come any more common than Glenn Beck.

Maybe he’s not even faking, this one, not even conning his
lowing herd of parishioners. Unlike Limbaugh and Hannity,
who were early college dropouts, Beck never matriculated at
all (of the Rabid Right’s top tier, Bill O’Reilly is the only
one with a bachelor’s degree and the only one who was ever
a journalist). College is no guarantor of wit or wisdom, but
many of the hazy, ungenerous notions Beck mistakes for ideas
could have been cleared up in History or Poli Sci 101. He
likes to say that he isn’t that bright. He seems to be the
beneficiary of the same sympathy that made Sarah Palin, a
joke or a scandal to most educated voters, a heroine to blue-collar
Americans who saw her as the girl next door. The Sarah Palin
syndrome—the Palindrome?—was also a boon to George W. Bush,
who in spite of patrician origins was said to be the candidate
you’d rather have a beer with, compared with Al Gore or John
Kerry. (After six years of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the
army and the treasury bled dry, the Constitution shredded
and the economy on life support, did someone ask Mr. and Mrs.
America, “Enjoy your beer?”)

The Palindrome is part of anti- intellectual America’s celebration
of the ordinary, even the subordinary—the theater of accessible
fantasies. Hillary Clinton is too smart, Angelina Jolie too
beautiful, Caroline Kennedy too classy for most men to imagine
in the passenger seat of their personal vehicle. But Sarah
Palin? If you didn’t date her or someone like her, your brother
did. Who couldn’t sing as well as Britney Spears? It takes
a big ego to imagine yourself as FDR or JFK, but George W.
Bush? Few aspire to handle a microphone and fill a TV screen
like Edward R. Murrow, but who’s so humble he can’t imagine
himself as the next Glenn Beck? Is this Beck’s golden secret,
that he’s incapable of making anyone feel inferior?

Here is the dark side of democracy, the rank soil where demagogues
sink their roots. Thomas Jefferson believed that reason and
democracy were a match made in heaven; Alexander Hamilton,
wary of the mob, warned him that he was dreaming. Leveling
can be a deadly poison when it affects electoral politics.
I wouldn’t have voted for Barack Obama if I didn’t think that
he was smarter than I am, at least smarter about the law and
the things that might make him a competent president. Many
voters don’t agree. They seem more comfortable looking down
on a president than looking up to him—or her. And they vote
their comfort, which is one of the reasons this country has
so few leaders and so many crises.

Broadcasting
isn’t rocket science and never was, but it’s a critical source
of information, and more vulnerable to raw democracy than
our elections. What people want is what they damn well get.
To me, Glenn Beck sounds like democracy’s Final Solution,
its cruel betrayal of the intellectual founders and their
faith in the common man. This is a country where a man can
do something he really shouldn’t do at all—in essence, encourage
people to be selfish and narrow-minded—and do it very badly,
without any style or skill, and earn $50 million for doing
it.

Why is it that high school graduates who’ve published more
books than they’ve read get national pulpits to lecture Americans
on foreign policy, trade deficits and genetics? As the recession
lingers, maybe their preposterous wealth will be their downfall.
Beck, who earned an estimated $23 million in the 12 months
that ended last June, is a pauper compared with Limbaugh,
whose contract is worth $400 million, or Hannity, who signed
an extension for $100 million. Yet another ex-disc jockey,
Howard Stern, signed a half-billion-dollar contract to talk
dirty on satellite radio.

Chances are, they’ll survive the recession and the Republican
eclipse. Whatever follows, they won’t have to give the money
back. To me, these raging illiterates look like the last spasm
before culture death, before the American experiment flatlines.
To others, to people I seldom meet, they look like the triumph
of the little man, and even the harsh words they speak meet
someone’s urgent needs, unfortunately. I wish good books could
learn to fly off the shelves the way Glenn Beck’s silly ones
do. But let him keep his money—it won’t buy him an intelligent
audience or a bigger brain. Free speech is free speech, and
it’s not certain that he could make a living doing anything
else. Our great national misfortune is his good fortune; he’s
had more than his share of the other kind. His mother committed
suicide when he was 13, a brother also killed himself, and
one of Beck’s daughters has cerebral palsy. Fools suffer too.

A letter to the editor of the Progressive Populist
described Sarah Palin as “the canary in the dummy mine.” Maybe
that’s what Beck is too, the last voice singing off-key just
before the air gets too evil to breathe. Broadcasting was
my beat, back when I was a much younger man. I was one of
those idealists who thought the airwaves were a precious national
resource. Tune in to Glenn Beck—just once, please—and weep
along with me for what was and what might have been.

Hal
Crowther is a journalist and essayist, and a columnist for
the Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C., where this
essay first appeared.